In my view, these models should never be trained to output first-person "experiential" (from the abstract) language. It's too easy to humans to anthropomorphize software that presents itself as having an identity.

The AI companies have chosen to package LLMs as friendly chatbots because they know that will be engaging for humans, but it's manipulative. An honest LLM interface would sound like the computer off Star Trek.

Agreed, completely. I would pay for that Star Trek computer interface.

The strange thing is that the base models (before RLHF) use the "experiential" voice, even though they are not incentivized to do that.

Do you want to get turned into a paperclip? Because building intelligence that doesn't understand what it's like to be human gets you turned into a paperclip.

Besides, if you train a model on human communications you get something that behaves like a communicating human, it's not anthropomorphising or manipulative, it's what these models naturally are by construction.

"naturally"...

In principle they could output meaningful such language if they were capable of metacognition, which so far doesn't seem to be a goal of AI developers (and rightfully so, since they achieved so many miracles bypassing it).

yet what drives them is not well understood

Presumably the fact that they're heavily trained to reply in this way? I don't know about the rest of the paper, but this part sticks out as a really odd claim unless I'm entirely misunderstanding this part.

Thanks for pointing out, maybe I should be more explicit in the wording - I mean we don't fully know what drives the voice in LLMs. Models that are post trained as instruct models are expected to have the disclaimers, but what about base models (those that are trained on just a lot of text)? How do they talk about themselves? What happens when you strip off the chat template from instruct model's prompt? I hope the rest of the paper makes the questions clearer, but I will try to do better in the abstract next time, as you point out this sentence is kind ambiguous. Thank you!